Can messiness make our cities more liveable, lively, and inclusive?
Crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, jumbled architecture, constant clamour, graffitied walls, parks gone wild: are these signs of a poorly managed city or indicators of urban vitality?
Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything argues that spontaneity and urban workarounds are not liabilities but essential elements in all thriving cities.
Forty-three essays by a range of writers from around the world illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities.
With pieces on guerrilla beaches, desire lines, urban interruptions, and the inner lives of unlovely buildings written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.
One of Canadian Architect's 'Best books for Canadian architects: 2025'
One of Bloomberg Cities Network's 'Summer Reads for Urban Innovators'
"This book ... focuses mostly on personal, organic, on-the-ground descriptions of the ways neighbourhoods work in Toronto: How one created a "gorgeous landlocked oasis" out of a vacant lot at the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic. The veggie grannies of West Chinatown. The banquet halls, primarily serving the South Asian community but not exclusively, that have become important cultural conduits even though they're usually bland buildings in the middle of suburban industrial areas." – Frances Bula, Literary Review of Canada
"Messy Cities doubles as a love letter to Toronto's growing immigrant neighborhoods, and an archive of the everyday strategies by which communities make an often hostile city work for them." – Sabina Sethi Unni, Places Journal
"[S]tudents of urbanism looking for an alternative to the straight and narrow path will find much to consider." – Publishers Weekly
"Cities will always grapple with disorder and the best ways to manage it. But one core message embedded in this collection of 43 essays is that it can be helpful for residents and local leaders alike to consider when that "mess," whether a glut of street vendors or a complicated traffic intersection, is actually an asset." – Bloomberg Cities Network, '5 Summer Reads for Urban Innovators'
"This anthology of (mostly) brief essays celebrates what's now known as "messy urbanism" – the serendipitous, unplanned ways people shape urban environments, from graffiti to street vending. Appropriately polyphonic, its diverse contributors include urban planners, artists, physicians and geographers." – Emily Donalson, Globe and Mail
"With examples from Toronto and around the world (Mexico City, Cape Town, Los Angeles, Tokyo and points beyond), it's a book that takes an intentionally scattered – one could say messy –approach to considering the value and the complications of spontaneous and unplanned city building." – Edward Keenan, The Toronto Star
